We woke up to the sounds of the “3 Stooges” outside our window at 6:30 am. Two locals were tossing large plastic jugs from the second floor of the building next to us- with a tremendous amount of talk and coordination. It went on for at least an hour.
At that point, we gave up on the idea of sleep and started our drive to Trabzon. The first half of our day was spent on a horrendous road crossing the mountains. Most of the pavement was freshly tarred- but they hadn’t quite gotten around to the gravel part. It went from tarred roads to horrifically pot-holed roads. We did see a brown fox scamper across the road- John claims that it’s good luck(?) Finally, we made it to the Black Sea coast. The cities on the coast are a mass of concrete boxes. They’ve done nothing to make this beautiful coast attractive- but the sea itself was far more beautiful than we expected.
The Turkish driving style is quite interesting. On open roads, they go like a bat out of hell- racing down the roads. When faced with the challenge of passing, they freeze and there can be as many as 8-10 cars following these huge trucks- no one willing to take the chance to pass.
Trabzon on Saturday night was a busy city and we took the first hotel we could find. Fortunately, it had A/C (barely working), an autopark and CNN. We dumped our bags and asked about a local restaurant. The staff claimed that the restaurant we wanted to go to was closed- but recommended the Suleyman, about 2-km out of town. After a 2M lire taxi ride (about 3 times what it should have been if metered), we arrived at this lovely restaurant on the Black Sea. 1M beers (we had been paying 400-600,000) and no service- it was a very strange place. It was filled with groups of Turks- some belonging to a football group. We made a quick exit, headed back to town and walked around to get a better feel of the city. It had a definite Russian tourist feeling. We grabbed a quick kebap and headed for the room.
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